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Because of the totally stupid and pointless lack of imagination and restriction on MyBlogLog which, (in my less than humble opinion), has had it's day I have choosen to check out blogcatalog.com which was a mixed bag of cool and junk.

On the plus side the directory approach ment that I have read some great blogs today, but on the other hand I have looked at plenty of error messages and badly thought out controls.

You see, while BC has cool info and features that MBL is missing MBL has a better user interface (UI).

I'm not ready to go jumping away from MBL which has mastered smooth UI (you did catch me showing you what that stood for... of course you did, excuse me) but on the other hand I'm not quite ready to sign up full force for blogcatalog.com "niver".

In fact if I could find someone to do the javascript tracking eliment for me I could do the rest in php and show them both a thing or three I am sure.

Both have this wealth of data that could be distilled into facts such as "What are the top three destinations on my site for people who came from google and where are they likely to go next?" or "What percentage of my 'community' visited my site this week?" or "What is the average time between visits to my site from members" and even "What percentage of visitors to my profile carry out an action like visiting my site or posting a comment?"

Where is my hotest page (I think I know that - it's the one on fire) but both of these guys could tell me that and more besides if they just pulled thier heads from out of their backsides for long enough to see that I have been spelling it out for months on this very blog (edit: comment aimed at MBL).

Both sites manage a measure of good when the numbers and ability exists to be great or even fantastic (like me).

Why are they lazily copying each other rather than blazing a trail?

It's this resting when they should be inovating that means that MyBlogLog will soon be infected by the Yahoo stagnation.

"Fair Thee Well" MBL we hardly knew you.

EDIT: OMG! Talk about tpye-o-graphical errors! What was I doing? Eek!.

Comments

go for it. somewhere around the web i ran into a community where you post your idea and others can contribute by programing, financially, graphics, etc., I think they even give out 10K for the best idea every month. I'll look for the link.

You bring up some great points Matt. And unlike MyBlogLog, we at BlogCatalog carefully monitor the blogosphere for criticisms and suggestions to make our service better and help our users drive more traffic to their blog. BlogCatalog only went social less than a month ago and we are trying hard to differentiate ourselves from myBlogLog.

We do plan on presenting our users with more of the data about their blog that we gather through our widget (geolocations, heatmaps, referrals, etc.), along with many other new features (BlogCatlog API and RPC-XML Ping Service to name a few). Your comments will surely be discussed in the days to come.
Thanks,
Daniel @ <a href="http://www.blogcatalog.com">BlogCatalog.com</a>

"And unlike MyBlogLog, we at BlogCatalog carefully monitor the blogosphere for criticisms and suggestions to make our service better..."

One thing MBL did do probably better than I ever though possible was monitor the blogosphere. It is impossible to respond to every post or comment, and on occasions I know some of my MBL posts were red by 3 or even 4 members of the MBL team without making a response.

The more a service grows, the harder it is to respond to all feedback, and when a service is under fire, as happened to MBL a few times, and the "cat is among the pigeons", it is hard to respond to 1000s of messages, and often there is a need to respond at the source, rather than tty to combat a tidal wave of poorly informed followers.

andy - I guess what i said didnt come out right. what i was trying to infer was that because MBL was so large of a service they likely don't have much time to spend reading posts and commenting. I completely admire what they have done and want to build upon it. BlogCatalog has the advantage of being able to engage our users and build features based on their suggestions; as we have proven by implementing several of your ideas. sorry about the confusion.

Typically it is much more difficult for a larger company to change directions. The beauty of being a small company is the ability to respond quickly and implement new ideas in days. I'm guessing the MBL guys are finding working in a Yahoo culture much more challenging than when they launched and created MBL. Committees, approvals, brainstorming sessions all get drawn out. Ideas get placed on hold. It's tough.

At BlogCatalog we can implement much faster. For example, last week Andy Beard (who I admire more than anyone in the blogosphere) suggested removing the redirects from listing pages so that we pass google juice. Daniel and I had a discussion that lasted perhaps 38 minutes and concluded that the pros of passing PR far outweighed the cons. Within less than 20 minutes the redirects had been removed and BlogCatalog now passes its huge PR to our blog member's blogs. So in total, we made a decision and implemented it within less than an hour. A large corporation with a similar decision at a minimum would have taken a bunch of formal analysis, presentations, meetings which lead to a decision..unless some other corporate matter becomes more important and the page rank issue gets tabled for later decision.

As far as interesting ideas go I have a biggy. Just currently only this page is monitored by BlogCatalog and it is fascinating to see who has been looking at THIS POST. What I would love would be some sort of code that goes <script...etc..foo=bar&postid=%YOUR-POSTID-HERE%...</...>, which for NucleusCMS users would be <%postid%> and something similar for each of the blogging platforms. (actually you could just detect the URL and use that as a page ID)

So you could show who looked at eah article. Also you could see what article was popular and what jsut dropped out of site.

For example, judging by the iscussion going on here just now I'd love to know how many hits this page has had (and can). If I could do that site wide taht would be something to write home about.

Also I have to agree with Antony Berkman on the much respect to Andy Beard front. Andy is cool and can come and play here any time.

Rob at YackYack for a while was running a hacked together tracking system that allowed me to see how many pages each visitor read who visited from MBL.
Some people visited and read 50 odd pages in a single session.

There are privacy concerns, and most blogs don't have a privacy policy. Mine just tells people I track and experiment with all kinds of things.

Rob is no longer running that script on his new server after he had some problems. While that level of data is being collected, whether it is good to provide the data in such a detailed form is another matter.

I haven't yet found a tracking application that is ideal, though I haven't tried the corporate packages which might get extremely granular though they would be more worried about the privacy issues.

privacy policy... I had not expressed one on this site. I think I should do that. I'll probably not go for a corporate package (I'm cheap like that) I just enjoy the "cool" of seeing the faces/avatars of my article readers.

Mind you, BC got a nice sharp increase on Alexia after the limit went live.

13/04/2007 · 18:42:03

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